In this quick video, I fix a problem that I created for myself. I didn’t plan far enough ahead when insulating and skinning the shop doors and ended up not having a place to mount one of the inside door handles.

I’m calling this video the third installment of my shop improvements series. It’s not a highlight of a single project, though. Since none of these things would make an interesting video on their own, I’m using this video as a catchall. I talk about and show the insulation and sheeting of the walls and ceiling, including painting OSB sheeting. Dealing with the barn doors, a random gap in the doorway of the shop that I filled with concrete, and reinforcing the sagging ceiling with additional joists.

In this video I tackle a minor improvement to the shop, adding door handles. This was by no means a critical improvement but it’s nice to have a proper thing to grab onto to get the doors open. The antique wrenches were bought from the Lafayette (OR) Schoolhouse Antique Mall, I recommend you check it out if your in the area.

In this video I build a lighted stand for my LEGO Saturn V model. This video is a bit different and is maybe more inspirational than instructional, though I did try to make a point to show some of the techniques I used. Below you’ll find a schematic that details the driver circuit for the LEDs. This is ridiculously simple and mostly consists of the LDD-1500H constant current LED driver. The LEDs are some high power ones that I had lying around. In the video you can see that I mounted them to a piece of aluminum with thermal adhesive, this was to offer some heat dissipation but it’s not nearly enough to run the LEDs at full power. You wouldn’t really want to anyway since they’d be painfully bright. So, I’m under driving the LEDs at 1.5 amps and have them set at ~1/3 their full brightness (at that current) via PWM. The LDD-1500H has built-in dimming capability via PWM and I use an ATTiny85 to generate the PWM signal and set the brightness. The code for the ATTiny85 is so simple it’s barely worth mentioning but is included below as well. I had originally planned to include a potentiometer but decided not to when building the circuit (I can always add it later).

This is v2.0 of my mailbox delivery notification system. In this version I scrap the XBee radios, and notification light for an ESP8266 and email notification of delivery. With exception of switching out the Arduino Pro Mini for an ESP8266 and an ATtiny85, all the other core components and construction are the same as v1.0.